Stainless paid “real money” for Carmageddon IP

Stainless Games ponied up a not insignificant amount for the Carmageddon IP, the independent studio has revealed.

Square … had very valuable IP that they had purchased that they were never going to use, and they took the surprising decision they were willing to sell this IP,” CEO and co-founder Patrick Buckland told Gamasutra.

“Most companies would probably just sit on the IP; why sell it? We paid real money for it, though.”

Stainless had been trying to obtain the Carmageedon IP, which it created, for years, with no luck.

“We’d been talking to SCI about doing more Carmageddon work six to seven years ago before they bought Eidos,” Buckland said.

“When they bought Eidos we were hoping to get more Carmageddon licensed work. We made them offers and tried to buy the license off them, but there was no way that Eidos or SCI were ever going to sell that license.”

Buckland commented that it’s a “very tough marketplace” for new IP at the moment.

“Of course there are ones that have worked well on XBLA – sold a million copies or something – but for every one of those there’s plenty of flops.

” … Your product needs to stand out from the others somehow … [A license] makes someone look twice, doesn’t it… they’re quickly zipping through the games, so if they just see another game that means nothing to them, they might not even stop, where if they see something that there’s some sort of recognition, in their subconscious even, they’ll go for it.”

Carmageddon: Reincarnation was made available to backers through Steam Early Access earlier this month, and thanks to video footage of the game, you can have a look at what backers are playing. The game will go into full Early Access on March 27.

Carmageddon dev, Stainless Games, has told an industry crowd at Develop that it never expected its 1997 original death-racer to be quite as controversial as it turned out to be, but joked that the team would be “heartbroken” if it doesn’t ruffle feathers with its 2013 reboot.